Somebody told me about a month ago that when Wilhelm Reich
presented his book, entitled "The Function of the Orgasm,"
to Freud, Sigmund replied with two words, "So thick?"
That's the best thing I ever heard about Freud.
So this is the poem called "Coming" in their honor.
I mean, I hope more in Freud's honor than in Reich's.
The ridiculousness of the act seen from above
will not be lost upon you.
I was telling people in the class the other day that just
after this book came out, after this new unselected came out,
at the very party at which people were supposed to be
telling me how wonderful I was, somebody came up to me and said,
you know, in that poem "Coming," you got your nuts and bolts
backwards.
The book had just come out, there's
nothing I can do about it but go all around the country
crossing out the line with the nuts and bolts in it somehow.
And I was telling them in the class the other day,
I am the one who fixes the toilet in my house.
I know which one has wings, but somehow it got past me,
and it got past the copy editor, and there it
was forever inscribed, and sold as truth.
Fortunately, there's been a revision,
and I'm buying up all the old versions of the book which
are the ones with this picture on the back, which I hope
none of you have copies of, because they've
taken that picture off, they didn't like it either.
But at least in the new one it got fixed plumbing.
"Coming is the body's way of weeping after a series of shocks
is suffered, after the thrust of things, the gist of things,
becomes apparent.
The bolt is felt completely swollen in vicinity to wrench,
this skid is clearly headed toward an all-out insult,
and the senses, one by one, abandoning their stations
into smaller hours, and thinner minutes,
seconds split till POW you had it, had it coming.
And it heaved, whose participle wasn't heaven, that was that.
And when you got some senses back, you asked yourself,
is this a dignified being's way of being born?
What a thought somebody had, or some nobody, out
of the breathless blue, making us double up like this,
half gifted and half robbed.
'Rise up to me,' the spirit laughed.
'I'm coming, I'm coming, the body sobbed.'"